John Hewitt

John Hewitt is a veteran contributor to ExtremeTech, an engineer, and a neuroscientist. He's also the former owner of CRE Precision, a machine shop based near Philadelphia, specializing in the design and manufacture of instruments for biomedical research.

Navigating through the brain to remove blood clots is tricky business. A team from Vanderbilt University has recently developed a robotic probe that can be steered around critical structures with an external controller, and suction off clots which can not be safely treated by drugs.

At the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks held this week in Dallas, researchers from IBM will be taking the wraps off of a new software front-end for theirneurosynaptic processor chips. The ultimate goal of these most recent efforts is to recast Watson-style cognitive computing, and its recent successes, into a decidedly more efficient architecture inspired by the brain., but is this realistic?

A group of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has built a powerful new chip that can be rapidly adapted to changing conditions at its interface nodes with neurons. They have used their chip to show that the speed of communication between neurons is not independent from any computations it might be said to perform, but rather, it is an essential component of the computation itself.

Google gets around 2 million job applications each year, and prides itself on human inspection of each one. Stock options and free lunches are always nice features to offer, but Google has an additional new perk package it is allegedly planning to offer — indefinite life extension.

Perhaps the biggest advance in DBS systems since they were first developed has just been reported by a group of researchers working in the movement disorders group at Oxford University. By recording activity with what is essentially a Brain Computer Interface (BCI), the researchers were able to close the stimulation loop with direct feedback from the subthalamic nucleus. The ability to incorporate meaningful data from the implant user’s brain into the moment-to-moment control of the stimulation puts the one-size-fits-all DBS system on the fast track to obsolescence.

The $250,000 Sikorsky prize for human-powered flight has finally been won. A Canadian team, AeroVelo, built a helicopter that was pedaled to an indoor altitude of a little over 3 meters, and remained aloft for 65 seconds.

Gallium is the chocolate of metals. With a melting point of 86 degrees, the stuff will literally melt in your hand, and then refreeze when you put it down. Gallium has another trick up its sleeve: it will rapidly form an oxide skin when exposed to air. This property has recently been exploited by researchers at NC State to do something pretty incredible — print stable 3D structures from liquid metal.

Mankind has always wanted to fly but now, having achieved that, the goal it to be able to fly indefinitely. Learning from sources as disparate as sailboats and turkey vultures, we may one day be able to keep high-performance craft aloft for huge lengths of time without requiring mid-air refueling of clunky ground tethers.

Just In Time workflow strategy has penetrated so deep into manufacturing now that even the automotive production lines now embrace it. In keeping with the philosophy Ford has introduced a sheet metal process that eliminates the need for time-costly dies to be machined. Ford’s F3T morphs metal with a blunt tool the way a chef would press a pie crust into a pan.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has proven to be a remarkable success for the treatment of many movement disorders. A dramatic video below shows what happens to Andrew “Cyber-AJ” Johnson just seconds after he turns off his medtronic DBS unit. AJ has Parkinson’s disease and his otherwise debilitating tremors are completely eliminated once the stimulators placed in the subthalamic nuclei (STN) of his brain kick in.

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